Presentation

The 2019 issue of Studia Phaenomenologica will be devoted to the topics of conflict and violence. Given the threatening presence of violence in the world we live in, its various concrete manifestations and the plurality of its meanings, this phenomenon constitutes a real challenge to any philosophical approach and, in particular, to phenomenology. One important matter that is at stake here is the issue as to whether phenomenology—by virtue of its being anchored in concrete experiences of subjectivity and by means of its distinctive conceptual endeavours and descriptive method—has a unique, theoretical potential to bring to light the intertwined meanings of the phenomenon of violence and related phenomena (such as conflict, force, power, war, terror, vulnerability, suffering, or murder).

Could the complexity of the phenomenon of violence be fully captured by crossing the perspectives offered by a phenomenology of intersubjectivity (addressing, for example, the problem of the hostile other, understood as an adversative alterity) and a phenomenology of affectivity (which focuses on the emergence of irritation, anger, wrath and rage as conditions for conflict)? Should phenomenological approaches to violence, which claiming a thorough perspective on the subject matter—confine themselves only to relevant discussions of the problem of embodiment (e.g. the problem of vulnerability and of the infliction of pain intended by those involved in factical situations of violence, including murder, as the ultimate violence or limit) by taking into account how these structures of the phenomenon are enacted in accordance with existential possibilities of spatiality and temporality? Or must other issues, including certain states of consciousness or social, ethical or political phenomena such as, for example, guilt or forgiveness, be considered here as equally important?